Shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon

On Tuesday, Ben Carson said he would react to a mass shooting like the one in Oregon by attacking the gunman: “I would not just stand there and let him shoot me. I would say, ‘Hey, guys, everybody attack him! He may shoot me, but he can’t get us all.’” Until now, there didn’t seem to be a way to verify the Republican presidential candidate’s claim. Would he really react that way in such a tense situation?

On Wednesday, Carson told SiriusXM radio host Karen Hunter that he had been held at gunpoint before. But in his telling, he did not react as he said he would, and he definitely did not attack the gunman:

The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah is pissed off at Ben Carson for blaming the victims of the Oregon shooting.

On Tuesday, the Republican presidential candidate described on Fox News how he would handle a mass shooting: “I would not just stand there and let him shoot me. I would say, ‘Hey, guys, everybody attack him! He may shoot me, but he can’t get us all.’” Carson has doubled down on the comments since then, telling Fox News’s Megyn Kelly, “If you sit there and let him shoot you one by one, you’re all going to be dead.”

People magazine isn’t a place you expect to see a call for political action. But following the Umpqua Community College shooting, People on Wednesday published the phone numbers, email addresses, and Twitter accounts of all 535 members of Congress so readers can tell political leaders to do something about gun violence.

In this week’s issue of People, editorial director Jess Cagle wrote:

Ten people were killed and nine others were injured in a shooting at the Umpqua Community College in southwestern Oregon on Thursday.

The shooter, who is included among the total dead, allegedly killed himself after police arrived at the scene, Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin said at a press conference. Police did not publicly announce the shooter’s identity, but anonymous law enforcement officials identified him to multiple news organizations as 26-year-old Chris Harper-Mercer.

How would Ben Carson have handled the Umpqua Community College shooting in Oregon? On Tuesday, the Republican presidential candidate said he would attack the gunman. “I would not just stand there and let him shoot me,” Carson said on Fox News. “I would say: ‘Hey, guys, everybody attack him! He may shoot me, but he can’t get us all.’”

But this is what someone tried against the Oregon shooter — and it didn’t work out, as the New York Times’s Alan Rappeport reported: “The heavily armed Oregon gunman killed nine people before taking his own life. The fact that an Army veteran who did try to stop him was shot multiple times and remains hospitalized underscores the risks of attacking an armed attacker, as numerous critics pointed out Tuesday.”

On Monday, The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah asked why the pro-life movement won’t support gun control measures that could save tens of thousands of lives.

“If pro-lifers would just redirect their powers toward gun violence, the amount of lives they could save would reach superhero levels,” Noah said. “They just need to have a superhero’s total dedication to life. Because right now, they’re more like comic book collectors. Human life only holds value until you take it out of the package, and then it’s worth nothing.”

It’s surprising today when a Republican leader voices support for the mildest forms of gun control. In the aftermath of the Umpqua Community College shooting, Republican presidential candidates have either dismissed calls for any federal action or shifted the conversation to mental health issues. For them, expanded gun control legislation seems out of the question.

But Republican support for gun control actually wasn’t that unbelievable only a couple of decades ago.

One of the most common responses to policy proposals that attempt to cut down on the number of guns in America is that they would be really hard to pull off. And it’s true — guns are deeply ingrained in US society (to the point that they’re mentioned in our Bill of Rights), so reducing the abundance of them will be tough.

But that doesn’t mean these policies are bad ideas. It just means it would take a lot of effort to get to the point of a gun-free society. As Fred Hiatt argued in the Washington Post, it’s still worth trying:

John Oliver is fed up with politicians using mental illness as a scapegoat to avoid talking about gun control — even as they do little to address the deplorable state of mental health care in the US.

“If we’re going to constantly use mentally ill people to dodge conversations about gun control, then the very least we owe them is a fucking plan,” Oliver said on Last Week Tonight on Sunday.

Stephen Colbert is exasperated with America’s unwillingness to do anything about its unique gun problem.

Breaking the comedic tone on his show on Friday, Colbert echoed what’s now a common theme in the discussion about guns: Why doesn’t anything change?

Should we reduce the incidence of gun homicides with stricter regulations about who can buy a gun and under what circumstances? Jeb Bush doesn’t think so, offering an argument that’s strikingly reminiscent of Donald Rumsfeld trying to explain away the chaos and looting in postwar Iraq.

Here’s Rumsfeld:

On Friday, during an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Donald Trump came very close to making an extremely good point about mass shootings. Asked what he would do to prevent future mass shootings as president, Trump immediately walled off the possibility of new gun laws: “First of all, you have very strong laws on the books.” But having done that, he found himself with a dilemma. He tried to blame shootings on “mental illness” — the standard line gun rights supporters use in response to gun control supporters who blame shootings on guns. But that didn’t actually lead him to any proposals for something that could be done. The result was (at least by Trumpian standards) a fairly nuanced point:

There’s a real problem here. It is obviously true that many of the individuals who have committed recent mass shootings have had mental or behavioral health issues. But mental illness doesn’t predict violence in the least — people with mental illness are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it.

When countries reduced access to guns, they saw a drop in the number of firearm suicides:

The data above, taken from a study by Australian researchers, shows that suicides dropped dramatically after the Australian government set up a gun buyback program that reduced the number of firearms in the country by about one-fifth.

What explains America’s extraordinary levels of gun violence among developed nations? For one, the country has an extraordinary amount of guns.

America has 4.4 percent of the world’s population, but almost half of the civilian-owned guns around the world — enough to arm every adult in the country:

America has six times as many firearm homicides as Canada, and 15 times as many as Germany:

This chart, compiled using United Nations data collected by the Guardian’s Simon Rogers, shows that America far and away leads other developed countries when it comes to gun-related homicides. Why? Extensive reviews of the research by the Harvard School of Public Health’s Injury Control Research Center suggest the answer is pretty simple: The US is an outlier on gun violence because it has way more guns than other developed nations.

It seems like there’s one thing everyone agrees on after a mass shooting: The shooter must have been mentally ill. President Barack Obama said as much in his reaction to the Umpqua Community College shooting on Thursday: “We don’t yet know why this individual did what he did, and it’s fair to say that anybody who does this has a sickness in their minds, regardless of what they think their motivations may be.”

But what if the assumption is wrong, or at least misses the nuance of the issue?

In his impassioned address in the wake of Thursday’s horrible shooting at an Oregon community college, President Obama issued a challenge to the media. “Have news organizations tally up the number of Americans who’ve been killed through terrorist attacks in the last decade and the number of Americans who’ve been killed by gun violence, and post those side by side on your news reports,” he asked.

Okay.

President Barack Obama is furious.

On Thursday, Obama spoke about the Umpqua Community College shooting in southwestern Oregon. He did not mask his anger about the tragedy — and America’s apparent unwillingness to do anything about it.

Responding to today’s tragic shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon, the White House is calling for stricter gun control measures.

”The issue of sensible steps that can be taken to protect our communities from gun violence continues to be a top priority of this administration,” said Press Secretary Josh Earnest on Thursday afternoon.